Let’s Begin Leadership Training in Medical School

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By Leon E. Moores, MD, DSc, FACS Published in Forbes Feb 5, 2025

 

While we primarily think of physicians as diagnosticians and treatment providers, that ignores a central aspect of the role: leadership. Doctors are leaders. Using the distilled definition of leadership in my book, blogs, and podcasts— leadership is influencing thought and behavior to achieve desired results—it is clear that all physicians lead.

 

Doctors lead patients, they lead treatment teams, and they lead support networks. However, they lead most effectively when they consciously recognize leadership as a core part of their identity and develop it accordingly. For that reason, I humbly submit that leadership training should begin on Day One.

 

By Day One, for most physicians, I mean the first day of medical school. I believe our medical schools have an opportunity to take a fresh look at the role leadership plays in day-to-day medicine, and in so doing we can begin preparing young doctors to lead more effectively in that capacity. The leadership tone set in medical school carries forward through physicians’ entire careers.

 

The first step schools can take is to acknowledge, right out of the starting gate, that all physicians influence behavior to achieve desired results. As educators, we can be explicit about this to our students and residents.

 

The current connotation of “physician leader” is a chief, chair, CMO, or the like. If we allow our students and residents to carry on with this impression, they will assume they’re not going to be asked to be “physician leaders” until ten years or more after graduation. Practically speaking, that’s not the case at all—leadership is an essential part of their role from the moment they first don the white jacket.

 

But here’s a crucial point. Being the “boss” and being a leader are not the same thing.

 

Young doctors have always been trained to see themselves as the eventual “boss”—the authority—in medical settings. They understand very well that “doctor’s orders” are not called “doctor’s suggestions.” But authority is a state; leading is a skill. It is a verb. It can be learned and improved upon through continual leadership training.

 

A foundational concept physician leaders must learn early on is that medicine is a team sport. And all team members play vital roles. However, physicians arguably have an outsized influence on the performance of the team. If the doctor is having a bad day, everybody’s having a bad day, and so on.

 

This kind of influence makes a real difference in the team’s performance, the team’s attitude, its error rates, the environment of care, and, ultimately, in patient outcomes. A good physician fully understands the power of this influence and develops the self-awareness and communication skills to harness it effectively and maturely.

 

How can medical schools help with this? Well, fortunately, leadership can be taught. And medical schools needn’t reinvent the wheel. A wealth of leadership theory and training material already exists. That’s because leadership is leadership, regardless of its application—whether that’s in the military, business, or healthcare. The same principles are obtained, and a great deal of knowledge has been amassed about how to lead in a wide variety of environments.

 

Medical schools already reserve a fair number of contact hours in their curriculum for training students in “leadership-adjacent” topics such as professionalism, communication skills, and teamwork. But if you look at most med-school curricula, these subjects are treated in a freestanding and somewhat disjointed way. They don’t fall within a coherent rubric.

 

If we were to pull all those topics together and design a progressive, four-year curriculum under the umbrella of leadership development, several benefits would emerge.

 

First, we would provide a structure and a vision for student success: this is what I am growing into. Second, we would provide a clear reason why this is important: as a doctor I will be influencing behavior; I want to be good at that because it will help me lead teams and take better care of patients.

 

As medicine continues to move into more proactive pathways—helping patients become healthier rather than mainly “fixing them after they break”—the ability to influence behavior will become even more important.

 

Let’s start now to recognize leadership development as a core competency for all doctors, not a “nice to have” or something to achieve years down the road. Let’s begin the work in medical school to develop all physicians as the leaders they are.

 

Leon E. Moores, MD, DSc, FACS Published in Forbes Feb 5, 2025

 

If you would like to talk to me, please call me on +2782 465 5481 or email me on markd@markdeavall.com

 

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